Gigabyte has quite a good reputation among PC hardware and gaming enthusiasts. I had the pleasure of seeing some of their solutions in their demo suite at the Venetian. Gigabyte displayed a plethora of graphics cards and motherboards, including a few motherboard engineering samples for Intel's next-generation platform due out in a few months. Samples spanned all budgets, including the GA-B75M-D3H, GA-Z77X-UD3H, GA-Z77X-UD5H, G1.Sniper 3, and G1.Sniper M3.

MSI is jumping on the Intel Thunderbolt bandwagon with a new product called GUS II. GUS II is an external graphics card enclosure designed to house a single card with a power draw no higher than 150 watts, ideally targeted at notebook gamers. The device operates over the Thunderbolt interface on one end with a PCIe X16 slot for cards inside the enclosure.

We stopped by Thermaltake to visit with them at their suite in the Palazzo hotel. Here Thermaltake showed us their new Level 10 GTS mid-tower chassis. The GTS features USB 3.0, EasySwap storage bays, an HDD storage system and a nice cable management system. The chassis is constructed from steel although there wasn’t a net weight listed. A 200mm LED fan comes pre-installed in the front for intake and there’s a 120mm rear exhaust fan.

We stopped by OCZ's suite at Aria to check out what they had on tap for 2012. The highlight of our time with OCZ was their next-generation Everest 2 NAND flash controller platform. Set for release next June, the SATA 6Gb/s interface boasts preliminary numbers of 550MB/s read and 500MB/s write with up to 90,000 4K random write IOPS. These IOPS are a good bit higher than SandForce 2000 series controllers are capable of.

We visited with Cooler Master at the Bellagio after they hosted one heck of a party the night before. Cooler Master is celebrating their 20 year anniversary with a plethora of new products for 2012. The PR team first showed us their upcoming heatsink known as the TPC-812 which utilizes a new technology called Vertical Vapor Chamber. We were told that Cooler Master is one of only two companies in the world that are capable of producing this technology.